How To Work With Windows Authentication and Local Databases

When I wrote that article, my development database was hosted on a remote SQL server and recently we’ve made a decision to move those development servers to our local machines. While I was working on migrating my database, I’ve hit a wall. Machine Access authentication simply wouldn’t work on my local SQL database.

Worse, the errors I was getting were cryptic at best.

Login Failed For User

Login failed for user ‘domain/computername$’.

After proving that I’m insane, by trying the same things over and over again and expecting a different outcome, I decided to dig deeper. Looking at SSMS error logs (Object Explorer –> Management –> SQL Server Logs), things got weirder.